I entered the arena this week all snarky and snarling, as if awakening from a tryptophan coma. It didn’t help Monday morning when what was supposed to be an 11-minute hold to speak with Bank of America’s service people about a problem we were having with our online banking turned into 45 minutes. One must find a healthy outlet for one’s darker moods, a way to vent. Yoga can lift the clouds. So can playing the guitar, a strenuous workout, or a good long laugh. Writing and the arts are good tonic, too, creativity being a prime refuge for malcontents from the beginning of time. The caveperson who did the drawings on the walls of the caves at Lascaux was probably a lousy hunter, got ridiculed for it, and found that drawing on the walls with a burnt stick was good therapy.
In the interest of venting creatively, let’s talk about why this billboard on south La Brea Avenue is the worst billboard in Los Angeles.
Naturally there are a lot of unsold screenplays around town, just like there are a lot of unsold cars in Detroit, billions of lines of unused code in Silicon Valley, and a legion of uncaught lobsters off the coast of Maine. It’s a company town, and this is what happens in company towns. Inventory gets stockpiled, and when the economy is troughing like it is now, it seems as if nothing moves off the shelves and more moves on all the time. Besides, everyone who’s ever written for films or television can show you a trunkful of unsold scripts, manuscripts, treatments and pitches. The bookshelves of every agent and D-person in the system are buckling under the weight of screenplays, spec pilot scripts and the galleys of unpublished novels to be pitched as film projects. The titles of these projects are all written on the spines. Occasionally you might see the name of a film that actually got made (”Memento”) a few that might have gotten made (”Naked Kill 3″???) and many, many more that you suspect will never get made (”Cletus the Fetus”). So yes, cosmetically, the billboard states a kind of truth. Most screenplays remain unsold.
Emotionally and metaphorically, however, this billboard is a terrible affront to the industry, and to anyone who ever put their time and effort into writing a screenplay. Here’s why:
Chase, the bank with all the ATMs, has never written a screenplay. Chase has never stayed up late at night after the kids have gone to sleep, or gotten up extra early in the morning before work to labor over a story in the longshot hope that the story will be the ticket out of a podunk town or a flatlining job. Chase has never been so inspired by the lives of others or moved by the tide of human events that the urge to turn the experience into a screenplay, a movie, a grand statement about the way you feel about the world, is every bit as biological and undeniable as a seed’s drive to seek the sun. Chase has never sat around with its college buddies, Citi, B of A, and Wells Fargo, and co-written the next big teen comedy, only to discover that nobody’s making teen comedies any more, the market has shifted practically overnight to RomComs.
Every one of those unsold screenplays was written by a human being with a dream, an idea, an inspiration. Chase isn’t human. Steinbeck put it this way in The Grapes of Wrath: “The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.” This is what makes the billboard on La Brea such a monstrous offense to the industry it claims to court. All those unsold screenplays are the hard-won badges of our humanity. They are the flags that keep flying despite the hardships of battle. They are the symbols of our striving, of our willingness to believe in our dreams, and confront the obstacles that stand between us and their realization.
As Christopher Walken might say, “If an actual person spoke to me like that billboard does, I’d stab them in the face with a soldering iron.”
Tags: Chase Bank, Cosmetic, Emotional, Levels of Meaning, Meta, Worst Billboard in L.A.
Word.
This is a beautiful piece Mike and expresses vividly what many of us (particularly those of us who have written unsold screenplays like me, but I think all of us) feel about this affront. You captured it well. Perhaps we need a screenplay about a modern Don Quixote who tilts at billboards and stabs them with joust-mounted-soldering irons…
Nice writing Mike. Thank you for your voice, elegance and humor as a writer. I like your point of view. Now go write a screenplay….
Chase is just trying to seem “cool” and “in the know” to their new California marketplace. And they look just as about as cool and in the know as that hackneyed word and phrase. Their advertising campaign in general is embarrassing. Their other ad boasting about soon having an ATM every few blocks also makes them look stupid in this time of corporate greed and waste. They should be boycotted for their insulting ads. And watch how they will be raising the interest rates on their credit cards and mortgage loans they inherited from WAMU.
As a writer with a screenplay that was optioned at one time, yet not sold, your words are so true.
There are a lot of mediocre screenplays, and some that are brilliant. But writing one is a demanding and often thankless job. Your friends and family look at you with admiration, at first. Your wife says sell a script so she can quit her job to live in Malibu.
Everybody seems to think you’re writing the Next Big Script that’ll sell for millions. You know better. A few hundred thousand would be fine, thank you. Get your foot in the door. But deep down, you have hope that you’ll see your name in Variety: “Screenwriter Sells Script For Boffo Bucks!”
Then reality hits.
You deal with the producer who asks for more rewrites, even after you’ve it re-written it 10 times. Or you work long hours with agents who promise the world, then leave you with no deals. Or your wife thinks you’re a failure. Your family and friends now begin to wonder what the hell is wrong with you. Isn’t writing a screenplay easy? Isn’t this what you went to college for? Why aren’t YOU selling your screenplay? Everybody else is!
As my daughter says, “Well duh!”
You know you can do better than the guys writing “Transformers 3: The Quick Edit,” but your stories are about humans, not dumb, noisy robots. If you do decide to write a piece of crud to get in on the Hollywood money, then you’re not even looked at.
It’s like working to get to the Big Leagues. You’ve got the film degree, writing ability, tons of writing classes under the belt, and you’ve written enough to get professionally noticed. Yet you get no further than the local baseball diamond, tossing the ball against the backstop, all by yourself. You know you can still play the game, but it doesn’t play the bills.
Writing isn’t brain surgery or rocket science, but it is a hard job. Chase has no clue and should stick to banking.
Right on Mike! Unless the story we tell makes people feel good, our human instinct is to either fight or flee. Same applies to advertising. In this case, the ad “tries” to be funny, but the snark is so strong that its at the expense of others – in this case the culture/community of Hollywood where the billboard is located. What a great example of how improv fails when you “try to be funny” instead of expanding the possibilities. Thanks for sharing this heartfelt post.